Solar Power beats all biofuels for cars

The carbon footprint life cycle of biofuels is far worse than Solar Power charged battery-driven cars. It makes sense to have an electric vehicle and solar panel your garage to charge it up.

PV conversion ... has lower GHG emissions throughout the life cycle than do cellulosic biofuels, even in the most optimistic scenario for the latter. "The bottleneck for biofuels is photosynthesis," Geyer says. "It's at best 1-percent efficient at converting sunlight to crop, while today's thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity.

Finally, while cost was not a key component of the study, Geyer says, "The cost of solar power is dropping, and our quick calculations suggests that with the federal tax credit, electric vehicles are already competitive."

What does this mean for the future?

"What it says to me is that by continuing to throw money into biofuels, we're barking up the wrong tree,"...